Mother Daughter Me (14 page)

Throughout her twenties and thirties, Sarah filled what must have been a large emotional void with passionless promiscuity. But in 1997, when she was forty-two, Sarah married a musician who was devoted to her from the minute they met. Since the late 1990s, Sarah has been living in a small town in northern Massachusetts, in a large and lovely old house she and her husband share with multiple cats. My sister is a quilt-maker with a fine eye for gorgeous fabrics.

My news prompts a flood of friendly emails in response. My mother and I send Sarah a late birthday gift, and we enter lengthy, complicated three-way discussions about the upcoming holidays, our gift wishes, her gift wishes, Zoë’s gift wishes. It feels good to be back in touch. Yet I’m wary. As close as we were as children, our respective relationships with our mother have cleaved us. While I’ve had, if anything, an overly close connection to my mother, Sarah’s relationship with her grew so tortured over the years that my mother decided that Sarah was a destructive presence in her life. Her solution was to get an unlisted phone number, which put me squarely in the middle of their troubles. Now, seeing the two of them back in touch, I’m thrilled. After years of pent-up need for my mother’s attention (“I’ve missed eight of Mom’s birthdays,” Sarah tells me in one plaintive email), Sarah is sending boxes filled with various things: handbags purchased from eBay; used books; earrings and bracelets she might have taken straight off her own ears and wrists. To Zoë she sends a tattered copy of Dodie Smith’s
I Capture the Castle
(Sarah’s and my favorite book) and several seasons of
Weeds
DVDs from Amazon.com. My mother and I send Sarah gifts she has requested, and we are all basking in the warm feelings of this renewed contact. But my mother and I also worry, because we know that Sarah’s manic episodes, in which she soars before she crashes, usually end badly.

Sure enough, several weeks into our rapprochement, Sarah takes offense at my mother’s diplomatic attempt to tell her she really doesn’t need any more gifts, and she emails me repeatedly about the perceived slight. I’m thin-skinned, too, but Sarah has always possessed something closer to a membrane—so fine it’s nearly translucent. Not knowing what to do, I do nothing. Predictably, as night follows day, as swiftly as it came, the rapprochement ends, and Sarah stops communicating with both of us.

SARAH AND I COME
by our sensitivity honestly, as I’ve had occasion to note several times since my mother moved in. For weeks my mother has been excited about a performance she wants me to attend with her at the Jewish Community Center, a klezmer concert performed by a duo from Buenos Aires. I tell her I’d love to go, and I mark it on my calendar.

But the day of the concert, Zoë informs me that there’s a volleyball game that night at her school, and although she’s not on the team, she’d like me to go. Fine, I tell her, but I’ll have to leave early to get to the concert on time. No problem, Zoë says. I go downstairs to tell my mother that, since there’s a volleyball game at Zoë’s school and I’m going to go watch some of it, I’ll meet her at the JCC instead of walking there with her.

An hour before we’re to leave for the game, I hear my mother call up to me from the base of the stairs.

“I really think I’m too tired to go out,” she says. “I’d rather just stay home and watch a DVD. Do you think you can get someone else to go to the concert with you?”

Zoë, who has heard this, emerges from her room. And this is the scene: My mother stands at the bottom of the tall staircase, Zoë is at the top, and I’m halfway up, literally and metaphorically sandwiched between the two.

It occurs to me that the last time I felt wedged like this between my mother and my daughter was nine months ago, when my mother had knee-replacement surgery. Knowing that Norm would be of limited help in such a major ordeal, I had flown to San Diego, with plans for Zoë to join me the next day. During the three hours of surgery, I sat in the brightly lit waiting room. After my mother was finally rolled up to her room, I stayed for several more hours, watching my mother drift in and out of drugged sleep.

When I picked Zoë up from the airport the next night, she complained of stomach pain. Early the next morning, she woke me to tell me she had spent the night sitting up because it was too painful to lie down. Several hours later, Zoë was being wheeled in for an emergency appendectomy. I found myself in the same surgical waiting room on the same couch I had occupied just two days before. But now it was late Sunday afternoon and I was alone in the room. I couldn’t find a light switch, so I lay on that small sofa in the dark, rested my head on the arm, and waited.

Forty-five minutes passed before the surgeon emerged. “That appendix was ready to come out,” he said. “We didn’t do it a minute too soon.” Zoë was taken up to the same floor as my mother. Only a long
hallway separated their rooms—convenient, I thought, but so very strange. Here they were, these two people on either side of me, both in need of care and attention. My bed for two nights was a reclining chair in Zoë’s room. She wanted me close enough so that she could reach my hand with hers. If I left the room for five minutes, Zoë complained it was too long, but I told her I had to look in on my mother periodically. The nurses on the floor grew accustomed to seeing me shuttle between the two rooms. During one of those late-night trips, a nurse smiled at me and, in a tone better suited to a chance encounter at the grocery store than an exchange on a sterile hospital ward, asked, “How’s the family?”

Now, on this staircase, I’m locked between the same two people, but this time there is no imminent escape in the form of a plane ticket back home. I
am
home.

“What’s going on?” I ask my mother.

“You probably want to go to the volleyball game.”

My mother is again speaking in code, and I think I get it, because this is very similar to the game I used to play when I was a child: What can I do to ensure that I am her priority? How do I get her to care? Only now the tables have turned. Now that I have an offer from Zoë, my mother is worried I’ll renege.

Actually, I don’t want to go to the entire volleyball game, but I do want to see some of it, and thirty minutes seems the perfect amount of time. “No,” I say in a measured voice. “I’d like to go to the concert. With you. I said I’ll meet you there, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Zoë, of course, has not cracked the code, or even understood that there is a code. She chimes in from her sentry position at the top of the stairs. “Why did you lie?” she asks my mother. The child has zeroed in on my mother’s indirectness, and she’s out to bust her for it. She has grown increasingly intolerant of my mother’s hidden meanings.

Before my mother and I have a chance to process Zoë’s pointed question, I hear my child gasp. “Mom! Did you give her your watch?”

I look at my mother’s new watch, the one I gave her for her birthday, which closely resembles my own. “No. I did not give her my watch,” I say, emphasizing each word.

My mother looks as if she has just swallowed poison. Slowly, she removes the watch from her wrist and holds it out to Zoë. “No, dear,
look at it. Come here. Look. It’s not your mother’s watch.” Her voice is cracking, and she’s visibly wounded, but because of the way she utters the word “dear”—a word I haven’t heard her use before, and one that is clearly not intended as a term of endearment now—there’s an instant when I’m put in mind of the wicked queen extending her arm to Snow White, offering her the deadly apple. The image stops me cold, partly because it’s obviously out of sync with the reality of what’s going on. Here’s my mother under attack and on the verge of tears, yet I’m so caught between her and Zoë that I can’t accept my mother’s vulnerability.

Zoë doesn’t budge from where she’s standing.

I instruct my mother to meet me at the JCC in a couple of hours. She goes downstairs. Meanwhile, I’m furious with Zoë for provoking a fight again, and I insist she apologize.

“I’ll apologize, but I still want to know why she lied.”

“Just apologize,” I snap.

Zoë goes as far as the top of the stairs, and I hear my mother start to come back up. I rush over. Zoë has offered a quick “I’m sorry.” Still, she can’t resist. “But why did you lie about not wanting to go to the concert?” My mother, who had been expecting a true apology, starts in on Zoë about her behavior.

By now I’ve given up on my attempt to restore civility. “You’re both acting like eight-year-olds,” I say.

This infuriates my mother. “Bullshit!”

Zoë stalks away. My mother descends the stairs once again. I call down to her that I’ll meet her at the concert.

I leave the volleyball game with plenty of time to get to the JCC, where I find my mother waiting for me in the lobby. She has on her new coat from her birthday expedition, a nice pair of boots, and a scarf knotted to perfection. She looks happy to see me, and I think maybe we can salvage this night after all. We take our seats. My mother’s feet are barely touching the floor. It dawns on me that I have never been to a live performance of any kind with my mother. There is so much we missed sharing, so many normal mother—daughter experiences we never had.

The Argentine musical duo is great, switching among flute, clarinet, saxophone, harmonica, accordion, and piano to combine jazz, contemporary
music, and traditional tango with the Jewish folk sounds of klezmer. I can see that my mother loves it. I look out over the sea of gray heads and think,
Oh, can’t she find a playdate somewhere in this room? There must be someone in this place, a kindred soul, maybe another smart, neurotic septuagenarian
.

As we walk home, my mother wants to chase the topic of Zoë, but I refuse. Lia has suggested we bring Zoë with us to the next session. If we’re going to work out our three-generations-under-one-roof, Lia believes, we need a mediated discussion with all three of us present.

WHEN WE ARRIVE AT
Lia’s a few days later, she has pulled an extra chair into her office from the waiting room. Zoë seats herself between my mother and me, clutching her cellphone—a teenager’s Binky—while my mother and I take our usual seats. My mother has come bearing an olive branch. Addressing Zoë directly, with a delivery that sounds carefully rehearsed, she says, “I might not be good with kids, but I’m hoping so much that our getting together can give me the tools to make things work with you. If you’d help me, I really would appreciate it.”

But Zoë isn’t going to make it easy. “I have so much other shit going on,” she says. She’s playing tough and squirrelly. “I don’t have the emotional time and energy to deal with you and the way you perceive me. I’m sixteen and going through a lot. I can’t worry about your emotions and how you feel about me.”

I had predicted Zoë would sit in stony silence, but I should have known better. And she isn’t finished. “My mom and I have been a twosome for so long, it’s really really hard for me to see her give you her attention.”

At this, Lia steps in. “Although it’s true your mother has responsibility toward you, she still has strong feelings for her own mother.”

It was a nice try, but Zoë isn’t to be stopped. She turns straight to my mother. “I’ve come to resent you for the way my mom grew up. That’s where a lot of my resentment comes from. It doesn’t sound like you were a particularly active mother. I have never gotten the impression that you and my mom had anything near the relationship we have. And now you come and insert yourself.”

Lia is a little taken aback by Zoë’s candor. “Your grandmother was totally helpless at that point,” she says. “She didn’t have the ability to pull herself together. She was lost. And that takes a lot of courage to admit. She’s clear now, she’s sober, and she’s committed. She wants to have a relationship.”

Emboldened, my mother adds, “I was a very troubled young woman.”

Lia turns to me for my reaction. “All I want is for these two to get along,” I say lamely. I feel like a house sparrow trying to keep its purchase on a branch while being buffeted by gale-force winds from two directions.

“I don’t want to be forced into conversation,” Zoë continues, and turns back to my mother. “Also, I don’t necessarily want your opinion when we’re talking.”

There’s a hard edge to my daughter that I’ve never seen before.

My mother is wearing a tortured smile.

Lia interjects. “How can we give this a chance to work?”

“What can I do to get to where you’re willing to just be polite to me?” my mother asks her granddaughter. “Or how about just human?”

Zoë announces that she’d like to be the one to set the ground rules on the where, when, and how of interaction between her grandmother and herself. “When we’re in the kitchen, wait for me to speak to you. If I want to talk to you, I’ll talk to you. I just feel too pressured to engage when I don’t want to.”

While Zoë’s rudeness is appalling, I notice that she has gradually inched her chair toward mine, and now she has taken hold of my hand; she’s caressing it, kneading it. My heart swells for my child. I want to pummel her and wrap my arms around her at the same time.

Lia tries to cast this outrageous proposal in a more positive light. “Helen, you’re trying to make friends, and she’s not ready to make friends. She’s saying, ‘I’m getting used to you. I’m getting used to your presence.’ It’s very difficult, what you’re trying to do, but also a great opportunity.”

Neither my mother nor my daughter appears to be welcoming this great opportunity. But perhaps they can be forgiven for their willed deafness, as Lia’s comment, well meant as it was, suggests that she hasn’t
been listening to what Zoë said either. Zoë is clearly not getting used to my mother and no longer sees her presence as an opportunity for anything but competition and conflict. Lia, I’m coming to understand, may well be a wise and experienced therapist, but with us she’s in over her head. Her practice centers on helping families puzzle through life’s twists and turns as people age, not helping adult children of alcoholics resolve decades-old issues now coming home to roost, accompanied by undisguised hostility from a take-no-prisoners teenage only child of a widowed mother. Lia signed on to help us adjust to the practical aspects of merging households, and now she’s being asked to help us work through forty-five years of accumulated pain.